Shame on all you naysayers, doubting the judgment of Trump and Bolton. I have no doubt that Trump will show the same intelligence and judgment dealing with Iran that he demonstrated in dealing with the Stormy Daniels imbroglio. He doesn’t even need to repeat his brilliant move of bringing Giuliani on board and turning him lose to do TV interviews. He’s already got Giuliani’s foreign policy twin: John Bolton! Bolton unquestionably has the same mental acumen and verbal skills as Giuliani. Maybe even better. Aren’t we lucky to have a President who can call on such geniuses to advise him!The same President who proved his mettle with his decisive response to Russia’s being caught red-handed interfering in American elections. In fact, has the insight to see that Vladimir Putin, far from being a murderous thug, is a great man worthy of great praise.And never forget: Bush is the Republican ideal of a President, faithfully executing the Republican policies of Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Orrin Hatch, Nikki Haley, et.al. 80 to 90 percent of Republicans support their Republican President and the Republican agenda he is so faithfully implementing.

Republicans just love a President who brags about sexually assaulting women, supports calling his own daughter a piece of a–,” uses ethnic and religious slurs, mocks the handicapped, advocates torture, and calls African countries “s–tholes,” to name a few of the things Republicans hold so dear.

Including Johnny Isakson, David Perdue, Barry Loudermilk, and Karen Handel.

The media are in full throttle reporting the fallout from Michelle Wolf’s acerbic and occasionally vulgar comedic monologue at Saturday’s White House correspondents’ dinner. They are paying particular attention to Wolf’s comments on White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders—while largely ignoring Wolf’s sharp rebuke of the media, when she said:

“You guys are obsessed with Trump. Did you use to date him? Because you pretend like you hate him, but I think you love him. I think what no one in this room wants to admit is that Trump has helped all of you. He couldn’t sell steaks or vodka or water or college or ties or Eric. But he has helped you. He’s helped you sell your papers and your books and your TV. You helped create this monster, and now you’re profiting off of him. And if you’re going to profit off of Trump, you should at least give him some money, because he doesn’t have any.”

Wolf highlighted what the media studiously ignore: the way the media are benefiting from Trump because he fuels the controversy on which they feed. To keep the benefits coming, the media–especially their talking heads TV component–are engaging in self-censorship regarding Trump’s caustic, hateful, racist, sexist rhetoric.

The media, in their willful blindness, are once more giving Trump a get-out-of-jail pass by failing to energetically highlight Trump’s own words that make him, and his Republican lackeys, to be far worse than Wolf by a country mile. I’m talking about Trump’s words that:

Bragged about sexually assaulting women

Called a Miss Universe “Miss Piggy”

Approved Howard Stern’s calling Ivanka “a piece of ass”

Demeaned the military service of John McCain

Mocked a handicapped person

Called African countries and Haiti “shitholes”

Said good words about neo-fascists marching in a Nazi-like parade in Charlottesville

Labeled Megan Kelly a bimbo after she called out Trump for his Rosie remarks

Accused Obama of engaging in a criminal conspiracy to hide his real birthplace

Lied about undocumented immigrants being mostly rapists and criminals

I thought that every TV commentator talking about Wolf’s speech would raise as many of Trump’s vile and despicable remarks as time allowed–better yet, have them displayed on the screen–to show that whatever Wolf’s words, they paled into insignificance compared to Trump’s. Instead, Trump’s words have been virtually ignored.

Quick: when was the last time you heard Anderson Cooper, Chuck Todd, or Lester Holt mention any of Trump’s words listed above?

The annual White House correspondents’ dinner this year, on April 28, invited comedian Michelle Wolf to deliver the evening’s comedic address. Her admittedly acerbic and occasionally vulgar remarks, especially those about the Trump Administration and White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders, elicited sharply different responses from some audiences. Here’s IndieDems view:

it’s a measure of the extent to which Trump and his Republicans have prostituted and vulgarized our politics that satirical remarks by a professional comedian about Sarah Sanders have ignited such a firestorm of self-righteous criticism by Trump and his Republican–the same people who had no problem when Trump:

Bragged about sexually assaulting women

Called a Miss Universe “Miss Piggy”

Approved Howard Stern’s calling Ivanka “a piece of ass”

Demeaned the military service of John McCain

Mocked a handicapped person

Called African countries and Haiti “shitholes”

Said good words about neo-fascists marching in a Nazi-like parade in Charlottesville

Labeled Megan Kelly a bimbo after she called out Trump for his Rosie remarks

Accused Obama of engaging in a criminal conspiracy to hide his real birthplace

Lied about undocumented immigrants being mostly rapists and criminals

In fact, Trump and his Republicans have told so many lies, they have made lying a Republican/conservative way of life.

These people who have spent three years marching with their President as he has taken American culture day by day into the sewer of vulgarity, crudeness, and hate, now rise to denounce the professional comedian Michelle Wolf for doing what she is paid to do: deliver a handful of comparatively mild satirical remarks. This exercise in pure hypocrisy proves the Republicans do not get it and never will. They must be destroyed in order to save our Republic.

“The criticism of Wolf by Republicans, the press and the public was inevitable. Comes with the job, and some of it I agree with. What makes it galling is that those screaming the loudest about Wolf are mute when it comes to Trump. The former is a comedian hired to tell jokes at a dinner where jokes are traditionally told. The latter is the president of the United States. His words, even the jokes, carry weight. They have real consequences and affect real lives. But we’ve become so used to the garbage that sloshes from his Twitter feed and his presidency that we have grown numb to how it sluices over our collective national psyche.”

Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker today published a column “Decent society is unraveling right in front of us.” Her most immediate motivation came from the incident involving members of the Syracuse University chapter of the Theta Tau fraternity, who simulated a sexual assault on a disabled student during an initiation ceremony. But Ms. Parker views the “fraternity gone bad” as “a symptom of a larger cultural disruption”—the waning regard for simple decency in American life. The incident, she says, should horrify anyone with an ounce of decency, “assuming people still recall what decency is.”

Ms. Parker does not mention the Republican Party or Donald Trump, but her words describing an absence of decency leap from the page as explicit descriptions of Trump and his Republican minions:

“appalling and disgusting on many intersecting grounds””

“these overcast days of indecency, cruelty and behavior bereft of empathy”

“a fresh episode in what should be understood as a gradual unraveling of decent society.”

Remember Trump’s mocking of a handicapped person in a campaign speech?

Ms. Parker most telling words are these: “Permissiveness in the guise of non-judgment has aided in the triumph of selfish expression predicted by cultural historian Christopher Lasch in his 1979 book, ‘The Culture of Narcissism.’ ”

“Somewhere in his imagination, he may have envisioned a future president who would act out his infantile impulses on the world stage when he wrote that ‘the logic of individualism’ would be carried to ‘the extreme of a war of all against all, the pursuit of happiness to the dead end of a narcissistic preoccupation with the self.’ ”

What better description of Donald Trump has ever been written? Two companion pieces in today’s Post elaborate on the theme:

Since the dawn of the age of Trump-as-president nearly three years ago, IndieDems has pointed out that he and his Republican followers are creating an America bereft of decency. Trump’s allies include most particularly Georgia’s own Johnny Isakson, David Perdue, Barry Loudermilk, and Karen Handel.

In December, I sent the letter below to several American religious leaders, quoting the growing chorus of religious and conservative voices speaking out in alarm about the danger to Christianity posed by a passive attitude toward the immorality, corruption, and sordidness of the Trump Administration and asking the recipients to offer their own comments. I gave them the chance to respond before the letter was published on this blog, so they would in no way feel blindsided.

Technical problems with this blog forced a delay in posting the letter. I publish it in its original form, although the issues it raises have become even more acute as Trump’s Republican Administration has sunk further and further into the gutter—with no concerted response from our major religious denominations, as far as I have been able to discover.

I am writing to ask your opinion of recent acts that I consider a travesty against the Christian faith committed by President Donald Trump and some who defend him in the name of Christ. Recent Tweets and public statements by President Donald Trump have, by any rational, objective analysis, crossed the line into expressions of outright racism and bigotry. He is also reliably reported to have, in private, distanced himself from expressions of remorse and apologies he was forced to make in response to public outrage over some of his previously expressed lies and hateful words.

I am writing because I believe that the silence of our major Christian denominations and churches in the face of Trump’s travesties constitutes a betrayal of the Christian message.

Trump on November 29 retweeted a series of inflammatory Islamophobic videos originally posted by a British far-right activist known for his extreme anti-Islamic views. The videos purportedly showed violence being committed by Muslims. The commentary on one of the videos, claiming it sowed a Muslim attacking a Dutch citizen, was patently false. It had already been proven the attacker was a Dutch citizen. The accuracy and circumstances of the other two videos are unknown. In short, the videos’ flagrant Islamophobias is unquestioned.

On November 27, Trump during White House ceremony to honor Navajo veterans of World War II resurfaced his derogatory reference to Senator Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas,” without explicitly using her name. His words: “Although we have a representative in Congress who, they say, was here a long time ago. They call her Pocahontas.” The use of the racial slur was widely condemned, including by Russell Begaye, the president of the Navajo Nation, who called the president’s mention of Pocahontas “derogatory” and “disrespectful to Indian nations.”

Trump’s previous nadir in his expressing an explicitly racist outlook occurred in August in his response to neo-fascist demonstrations held in Charlottesville, VA. Trump public played down the racist and anti-Semitic views of the white supremacists who held a proto-Nazi torch light parade that included chants of “Jews will not replace us.” He drew an apparent moral equivalency between neo-Nazi marchers and anti-racist protesters, declaring that there were “fine people” on both sides, and he blamed the news media instead for stoking racial divisions.

Trump’s remarks were roundly condemned, even by many Republican leaders and, reportedly, in private by members of his Administration. American Jews reacted strongly: “Four coalitions of rabbis, hailing from different strains of American Judaism, publicly spurned Mr. Trump, denouncing him in unusually pointed language, and pre-emptively announcing that they would not participate in any conference call before the Jewish holidays…” (See “Rabbis Protest Trump’s Comments by Boycotting Conference Call”)

It is the above explicitly racist comments by Trump which sparked this letter. But in the background are the plethora of words Trump has spoken in the two and one-half years since he has announced his candidacy for president that prove him to be, undeniably, a serial liar, racist, bigot, misogynist, nativist, demagogue, xenophobe, and bully. For almost a year, Trump and the Republican Party have waged a war against America’s basic moral and democratic values and against common human decency. The few Republican leaders who have dissented have paid by having their political careers ended.

The Republicans’ descent into a moral sewer has reached its current nadir (although most likely not its last) with their endorsement of sex predator Roy Moore for United States Senator. I cite below one of the Republicans for whom this goes too far. My own response is: if you support this despicable cretin, may God have mercy on your immortal soul.

Even more chilling is the defense offered by many average Americans for sticking with Trump despite his in-your-face trampling of the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule. Yes, they say, I know all about what Trump is doing. “I just don’t care. He speaks for me.” According to a recent poll, 72 percent of evangelicals now say that “an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life,..”

Conservative and Christian Voices Condemn Trump & Trumpists

(All words in red or bold face are “emphasis added”)

Lest I somehow be accused of bias, let me quote from some of Trump’s conservative and evangelical critics, who have already made the case against him much more eloquently and forcefully than anything I could add.

David Brooks, dean of America’s traditional conservative columnists, recently delivered a forceful indictment that is riveting in its recognition that Trump’s assault on America’s basic moral and democratic values is an assault on Christianity itself:

“…First, (Trump) asked the Republican Party to swallow the idea of a narcissistic sexual harasser and a routine liar as its party leader. Then he asked the party to accept his comprehensive ignorance and his politics of racial division. Now he asks the party to give up its reputation for fiscal conservatism. At the same time he asks the party to become the party of Roy Moore, the party of bigotry, alleged sexual harassment and child assault.”

“…Trump…is defined by shamelessness, and so there is no bottom. And apparently there is no end to what regular Republicans are willing to give him.”

“You don’t help your cause by wrapping your arms around an alleged sexual predator and a patriarchic bigot. You don’t help your cause by putting the pursuit of power above character, by worshiping at the feet of some loutish man or another, by claiming the ends justify any means. You don’t successfully rationalize your own tawdriness by claiming your opponents are satanic.”

“You don’t save Christianity by betraying its message.”

“ ‘What shall it profit a man,” Jesus asked, “ ‘if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul?’ The current Republican Party seems to not understand that question…The rot afflicting the G.O.P. is comprehensive — moral, intellectual, political and reputational.”

“In all of this, there is a spectacular accumulation of lies. Lies on disclosure forms. Lies at confirmation hearings. Lies on Twitter. Lies in the White House briefing room. Lies to the FBI. Self-protective lies by the attorney general. Blocking and tackling lies by Vice President Pence.”

“This is, with a few exceptions, a group of people for whom truth, political honor, ethics and integrity mean nothing.”

“We are witnessing what happens when right-wing politics becomes untethered from morality and religion.”

“What does public life look like without the constraining internal force of character — without the firm ethical commitments often (though not exclusively) rooted in faith?

It looks like a presidential campaign unable to determine right from wrong and loyalty from disloyalty.

It looks like an administration engaged in a daily assault on truth and convinced that might makes right.

It looks like the residual scum left from retreating political principle — the worship of money, power and self-promoted fame. The Trumpian trinity.”

Gerson returned to the fray after Trump’s vociferous denunciation of NFL players who kneeled during opening ceremonies of football games to protest the mistreatment of African-Americans, under the headline America has a racial demagogue for a president:

“(Trump’s) ignorance is matched by malice. Trump must know that rallying his white base against young African American protesters is feeding racial tension and providing permission for bigotry. He is essentially accusing these athletes of disloyalty, just as he accused Mexicans of being rapists and Muslims of being threats. This is a pattern and habit of division by race, ethnicity and religion.”

“President Trump is an ultimate and consummate worshiper of money, sex and power. American Christians have not really reckoned with the climate he has created in our country and the spiritual obligation we have to repair it. As a result, the soul of our nation and the integrity of the Christian faith are at risk.

Alabama evangelicals expressing support for Senate candidate Roy Moore “may be the most damning testimony as to the politicized moral hypocrisy of white evangelicals…”

“Week after week, Trump reveals that his leadership is always and only about himself; not the people, the country or even his party — and certainly not about godliness.”

Kurt Bardella, a Republican and former spokesperson for Breitbart, the white supremacist group once led by Steve Bannon, announced on December 8, 2017 that he was quitting the Republican Party and joining the Democratic Party, after Trump traveled to Pensacola, FL., to deliver a rousing speech endorsing sex predator Roy Moore for U.S. Senator from Alabama. In a scathing op-ed in USA Today, Bardella said:

“This is not a party I want to be associated with anymore”

He accused Trump and Bannon of “ignoring legitimate issues about race relations in America, environmental policy, gun reform and equality to instead pander to a lunatic fringe that subscribes to an ideology of hate and fear.”

“This is a party that constantly buries its head in the sand on climate change, racial profiling, guns, LGBTQ equality, income inequality, food insecurity, paid family leave and the treatment of women.”

“The embrace of Moore by the Republican Party’s top ‘leadership’ is all the proof you need to know that this is a party that no longer stands for anything.”

“I’ve been a part of both (the Republican Party and evangelicalism) for my entire adult life. These days, though, in many important ways they are having harmful effects on our society.”

“Yet the support being given by many Republicans and white evangelicals to President Trump and now to Mr. Moore have caused me to rethink my identification with both groups.”

“I consider Mr. Trump’s Republican Party to be a threat to conservatism, and I have concluded that the term evangelical…has been so distorted that it is now undermining the Christian witness.”

“Where exactly is the bottom? And at what point do you pull back from associating yourself with a political party and a religious term you once took pride in but that are now doing harm to the things you treasure?”

Mr. Wehner goes on to quote three of his evangelical colleagues who say they will no longer use the term because, in the words of one, “the term is now so stained as to ruin my ability to be what evangelicalism was supposed to be.” He also quotes Bill Boyce, the head of the Princeton Evangelical Fellowship, a campus ministry for more than 80 years, explaining why the group changed its name to the Princeton Christian Fellowship. “We’re interested in being people who are defined by our faith and by our faith commitments and not by any sort of political agenda.”

William S. Brewbakerwrote from Tuscaloosa, AL on November 15: “As an evangelical Christian, an Alabamian and a Republican, I’m ashamed of Roy Moore and upset that so many people are determined to defend him against sexual assault allegations, no matter what. I’m even more bothered, however, by what Mr. Moore’s popularity says about the sorry state of evangelical Christianity.”

It is wrong to excuse one’s own moral failings while rushing to judgment over the sins of others…We are to love and forgive our enemies, as God has loved and forgiven us.

Brewbaker took issue with some evangelicals for “arrogantly identifying the success of a given party or political movement with the advancement of the Kingdom of God.”

Numerous other conservative voices recognized long ago what a threat Trump is to traditional conservative and Christian principles: George Will, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Jennifer Rubin, to name a few.

The Republicans’ Arrogant Trashing of Jesus’ Golden Rule

Please explain to me, (Reverend/Pastor/Bishop), where you find one iota of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” in a President who:

–Bragged about sexually assaulting women and called them bimbos

–Hired sex predator Roger Ailes as a chief adviser, after Ailes was forced out of Fox News

-Demeaned John McCain’s military service

–Mocked a physically handicapped person

–Impugned the integrity of a respected federal judge on the basis of his ethnic origin

–Belittled the mother of a martyred American-Muslim soldier

–Talks about Muslims the way Hitler talked about Jews

–Incited his followers to violence.

–Praises the thug Putin.

–Appointed an alt-right white nationalist extremist as his Presidential Counselor

–Advocated punitive measures against American citizens on the basis of their religion.

–Used profanity in public

–Accused Ted Cruz’s father of involvement in JFK’s assassination

–Refuses to pay the bills due small businesses who worked for him.

–Bilked innocent people of their money in a scam involving a phony university

Reverend Frank Graham on Trump

Despite all the above, Reverend Franklin Graham said in early December, 2017, that no president in his lifetime had taken such a “strong, outspoken stand for the Christian faith” than President Trump. After Trump’s election last year, Graham stated that Trump defeated Hillary by the “hand of God.”

My Questions to You, (Reverend)(Pastor)(Bishop)

When did you and the (First Baptist Church of Woodstock)(Southern Baptist Convention)(Roswell Street Baptist Church)(Presbyterian Church U.S.A.)(Johnson Street Baptist Church)(The Episcopal Church) decide to throw overboard God’s Ten Commandments and Jesus’ Golden Rule? (Which you have done by remaining silent in the face of Trump and the Republicans wholesale defiance of both.)

When did you decide that the Bible’s words about abortion and homosexuality had completely replaced the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule as edicts to live by?

When did putative Christians decide that “I don’t care” is an acceptable response to explain their continued support for Trump? Does God really accept this as a reason to live in defiance of His Commandments and the Golden Rule? Do you?

If you choose to defend your refusal to denounce Donald Trump and the Republican Party, please include specific words that refute or take issue with the specific words published by the Trump critics cited above, especially those printed in red. Please do the same for each of the bullet points in the sub-section, “The Republicans’ Arrogant Trashing of Jesus’ Golden Rule.”

Do you believe, (Pastor)(Reverend/Bishop), that the opinions of the religious voices (including yours, if it applies) that support Trump are worth more than the dissenting voices of Peter Wehner, William S. Brewbaker (and other evangelicals), Kurt Bardella, Michael Gerson, David Brooks, George Will, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, and Jennifer Rubin?

Here is my statement about Franklin Graham: “I believe that Reverend Frank Graham’s declaration that Trump has taken a stronger, more outspoken stand for the Christian faith than any other President in his lifetime is, itself, an act of blasphemy and a travesty of Jesus’ message.”

My question: Do you agree or disagree with my statement?

But above all, (Pastor Johnny)(Dr. Lewis)(Pastor Wright)(Dr. Moore)(Reverend Nelson)(Bishop Curry), please tell us how you talk to the children in your flock—or your own children and grandchildren—about having as a role model a President who approves of calling his own daughter a piece of ass?

I am sending you this message prior to its posting on my blog IndieDems.com in order to give you a chance to consider it and respond. If you wish to reply in advance of its posting, please send me a copy as an attachment to an email. I will publish it verbatim. Or, you can wait until it is posted on my blog, and click COMMENT to post your reply directly.

The New York Times today published a detailed look at the known facts about the crimes and acts of malfeasance already uncovered by Mueller and other investigations. The list further eviscerates any idea that Mueller’s probe is a witch hunt or that his investigation has reached a dead end by allegedly not proving “collusion”–a term that appears nowhere in the Justice Department directive establishing Mueller’s probe.

Excerpts:

(Mueller) has already provided an instructive guide to the swampy world of corporations, law firms and Washington lobbying shops,

The indictment of Paul Manafort lifted a rock on manipulation that’s usually hidden.

One-fifth of the condos owned by Trump in the United States were sold to shell companies like those Manafort used…Since Trump won the Republican nomination, 70 percent of domestic real estate sales by his companies were to shell companies

A Times investigation found that this sort of behavior is business as usual for many big developers,

A shell company obscured the purchase of a lobbyist’s luxurious home by the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, when he was an Oklahoma state senator in 2003.

The recent attention to Mr. Trump’s “personal attorney” Michael Cohen illuminated another not uncommon practice of the business world…keeping people quiet.

A lawyer from another top law firm has been involved in attempts to squelch the story of Trump’s alleged fathering of a child out of wedlock

“In the world of white-collar crime, business as usual has meant that the attorney-client privilege has often been a means to keep the law at bay…All this is an indictment of a criminal justice system that has fed the swamp in which Mr. Trump and his ilk thrive. “

Joe Scarborough, former Republican Congressman and current TV/newspaper commentator, recently wrote that he does not believe Trump will run for re-election in 2010. In the process, he joined the media hallelujah chorus that has turned Trump lap dog Nikki Haley into some kind of Nikki-the-giant-killer avatar because she publicly rebuked a Trump aide for stating she was confused when she said on TV that the U.S. was going to impose more economic sanctions on Russia.

Turned out that was the decision in place when she went on TV, only Trump had overturned it at the last minute–and no one had informed the United States Ambassador to the United Nations.

Scarborough went on to beat the presidential drums for Haley.

IndieDems Comment:

I am about to puke over the media frenzy falsely declaring Nikki Haley as a virtual Joan of Arc for poking Trump in the eye. Scarborough’s joining the hallelujah chorus has only magnified the symptoms. Nikki Haley’s track record shows her as one of Trump’s most sycophantic, obsequious lap dogs.

Where was Nikki Haley’s disgust when Trump:

Demeaned the military career of John McCain

Accused Obama of engaging in a conspiracy to disguise the “fact” that he was foreign-born

Used an ethnic slut to insult a federal judge

Accused Mexican undocumented immigrants of being mainly rapists and criminals

Praised the thug Putin

Said good words about neo-fascists staging Nazi-like parades in Charlottesville

Mocked the handicapped

Tells lie after lie.

But more to the point, where was Haley’s anger when Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women and called them bimbos; appointed sex predator Roger Ailes as a key advisor; and approved calling his own daughter a piece of a–. Or when Trump appointed white supremacist and overt misogynist Steve Bannon as his campaign czar and then as a Presidential Counselor.

Haley showed no problem with Bannon’s words: “There’s No Hiring Bias Against Women in Tech, They Just Suck at Tech; Birth control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy; Would You Rather Your Child Had Feminism or Cancer?”

But the question Haley needs to be asked: “who do you believe? The women who have accused Trump of sexual harassment, or the Trump who calls them liars?”

Why have our TV pundits gone overboard for the Nikki Haley who only gets mad and reacts when she is personally insulted, but gives not one tinker’s damn about the other targets of Trump’s venom? What a pathetic example of “in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” Haley is just another Paul Ryan/Mike Pence clone.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank has addressed President Trump’s recent words referring to immigrants “breeding” in America’s sanctuary cities. He points out that the use of the term and its companion, “inbreeding,” has been a staple of racist bigots and anti-Semites throughout history, most notably by Hitler and the Nazis, e.g., Nazi propaganda from 1944:

“Jewry is the product of the inbreeding of asocial, criminal, sick, degenerate, and rejected elements. . . . [It] leads a rootless, parasitic life at the expense of the host peoples. Its current homeland is largely the criminal neighborhoods of the great cities of the world.”

Milbank goes on to provide examples of current Republicans likening immigrants and minorities to breeding animals:

Trump appointee Carl Higbie resigned after the publishing of his earlier complaints that black women think “breeding is a form of government employment.”

The most significant aspect of all this for Georgians is the fact that Georgia Republicans like Johnny Isakson, David Perdue, Barry Loudermilk, and Karen Handel–by their silence–show that they are quite comfortable with such speech. But do not doubt Georgia Republicans’ innate morality. Why, any day now, they are likely to erupt with a denunciation of Nancy Pelosi as the embodiment of all evil.

Michael Gerson, conservative commentator and former G.W. Bush speechwriter, recently published a column “Are these evangelicals ready to topple the idol of politics?”

(Excerpt) …the reaction against the Trump evangelicals among other evangelicals is still in the emergence stage…a group of 50 ethnically and denominationally diverse evangelical leaders (recently) met to discuss the sad state of their movement…The predominant narrative of white evangelicalism is tribal rather than universal: Christians, who once set America’s moral and political terms, are under legal and cultural siege by the forces of secularism. Now they must find political allies and fight back before they are thrown to the lions…

IndieDems Comment:

Why does Gerson limit his remarks to evangelicals? Where in God’s name are the leaders of our major Christian denominations? They remain silent as Trump and his Republicans sink deeper and deeper into a cesspool of criminality, corruption, and contempt for America’s basic moral and democratic values, contempt for God’s Commandments, and contempt for common human decency.

The absence of a concerted Christian opposition to Trumpism takes us back to the days when Christians remained silent about slavery and then segregation. Christian hypocrisy has reached new heights of shame.

Our current Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Catholics seem closer to the doctrines of the 19th Century Baptists who founded the Southern Baptist Convention as the Christian instrument to perpetuate slavery. Or the 1950’s Christians who let it up to the lawyer Joseph Welch to point an accusing finger at Joe McCarthy and his Trump-like followers to start the destruction of McCarthyism.

It’s not just the love of money that characterizes our putative Christian leaders, as some claim. It’s their total abandonment of the 10 Commandments and the Golden Rule to accommodate Trump and his morally and intellectually corrupt Republicans that makes American Christianity nothing but an exercise in hollow hypocrisy.

Our current Christians’ silence as Trump deals daily blows to every principle of the Judaeo-Christian ethos has become equal to the silence of previous generations of Christians to slavery, segregation–and the rise of fascism and Naziism in the march toward the Holocaust. Christian hypocrisy once more knows no bounds.

When did we reach the point where the only thing you need to do to show you are a Christian is point your accusing finger at abortion, gays, or the use of contraceptives? Or at Bill Clinton? Trump literally tramples on the 10 Commandments and the Golden Rule daily–and our so-called Christians keep their heads firmly in the sand.

But God is not mocked, and these hypocritical Christians are in for a rude shock on judgment day.

Wow. Trump and the Republican Party are in overdrive to make adultery a way of life in America, the way they have worked to make lying a way of life. Trump, Giuliani, Newt Gingrich–birds of a corrupt, adulterous feather do stick together, don’t they?

To you young Americans: the Republican Party was once actually led by decent, honorable people. Go to Wikipedia and look up Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight David Eisenhower. Those days are obviously gone forever.

Yes, you live in an era of the total moral and intellectual corruption of the Republican Party, and the total hypocrisy of your religious leaders for failing to speak out against the immorality and corruption in which the Trumpists are enveloping us. But do not despair. Remember, Trump’s opponent got 3 million more popular votes than he did, and the strength of the lying and adultery-loving immoral and corrupt Republicans is exaggerated by the unrepresentative U.S. Senate and the Republicans’ gerrymandering of Congressional districts to frustrate the popular will.

Rededicate yourselves to ousting these NRA-loving sleazebuckets from office and have faith better days will come.